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AI Is Dismantling Digital Advertising as the Internet Dismantled TV

David Cohen, the IAB's chair, is drawing a direct parallel between two waves of disruption: just as the internet fragmented audience attention and collapsed traditional media economics, AI is now fragmenting digital advertising's business model—eroding predictable CPMs, destabilizing targeting assumptions, and forcing a reckoning with content economics that have relied on scale rather than direct value exchange. The framing matters because it resets industry expectations: this isn't a marginal efficiency play or a tool to be integrated—it's a structural shift that will require business model reinvention, not optimization. The next phase will likely look less like "AI-powered advertising" and more like "what advertising becomes after AI remakes the internet."